


Iniquity

by refurinn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-10
Updated: 2013-02-10
Packaged: 2017-11-28 19:44:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/678197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/refurinn/pseuds/refurinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was just business, just a transaction, until it wasn’t.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Iniquity

**Author's Note:**

> For the shy anon on tumblr who asked for a rentboy!AU. This isn’t want you wanted, I know. Sorry it turned out choppy and depressing.

He tried to keep his distance at first, limit himself. It wasn’t proper for a man in his position, not any aspect of it. But when the work became too much and his self-loathing reached its highest point, he needed it. An indulgence fuelled by shame, just something to make sure he could still feel, that he was still alive. He had promised himself that it would only happen once, twice, only happen three times. Then Greg had come along, and he wasn’t the first but he was the fourth, the fifth, every time from thereon.

Greg was something else. A touch of beauty in a place disgusting and dark. He wasn’t pure, no, not by a long shot, but he was _good_. He was bright. Not a star in the sky, not naïve enough for that, not clean enough. But a streetlamp, glowing in the night, trapped on a filthy street but above it all. High up. Mycroft felt vile, like a predator, every time he came back for more, but he couldn’t stop. Greg’s skin was addictive. It still clung to the smoothness of youth, and it smelt of soap rather than of sweat. Mycroft would rub his jaw against Greg’s arm and then it would smell like him, his cologne, like he was Mycroft’s for the taking. Which he was, for as long as Mycroft was willing to pay. But he never belonged to Mycroft, not even in the middle of it all. Not when Mycroft finally felt his chest unclench and not when his limbs relaxed and fell limp, a moment of peace before the hatred slammed back down. The only peace he ever got.

It was just business, just a transaction, until it wasn’t.

_Mycroft kissed because he didn’t have enough control not to. He tried so very hard to ask only for things that would not make Greg feel uncomfortable, but he only had so much willpower. Greg surged up against him, lips soft and full, and there was a crackle in Mycroft's ears, a drop in the pit of his stomach. An emotion that wasn't supposed to be there, more pain than anything else. He thought he must look wrecked to Greg, desperate and broken. Maybe he looked like nothing at all, just a careful blank mask. He didn’t know what it was Greg saw, but it made Greg push him back, hands on his shoulders, and kiss him again. Kiss the expression away, kiss some life into a blank face, do nothing at all but kiss for pleasure. No, not pleasure. For work. For pay._

‘Do you like it here?’ he asks, the fifteenth – no, eighteenth –the twentieth time. He cringes inwardly, facial muscles tightening with displeasure. Such a horrid thing to ask, surely a slap in the face to the only man who has ever truly brought him happiness. Who treated him like an equal, like a man. Just a human, and nothing more.

‘It’s all right,’ Greg says lightly, attention still mostly turned toward a worn copy of _Lolita_. It’s tucked up on his chest, too close to his face but Mycroft has realised by now the trouble he has with his eyesight, what he thinks must be kept a secret, or perhaps does not realise is a liability at all. His bottom lip is tucked in beneath his teeth, forehead creasing in concentration then smoothing out into something plain and lax when he reads something he likes. His eyes lift momentarily from the pages, throwing a mischievous grin Mycroft’s way, all large teeth and crinkled eyes. He looks silly. He looks gorgeous. He looks so very unattainable, that Mycroft’s hands begin to shake in his lap.

_‘You this time,’ Greg whispered, ‘or me?’_

_‘You,’ Mycroft told him, wishing Greg wouldn’t ask, wishing he’d just take, just do, and then it’d be over and Mycroft could feel better for a little while. Just a small, small while, and hope it would be enough to get him through the week._

Greg’s eyes flick back down to his world away from here, and Mycroft stays firmly planted in the here and now, reclining on threadbare sheets, thin and smelling clinical from too many washes. Mycroft stares at the ceiling, sickly brown and stained with water spots. He feels unease at the fact that he _is_ at ease here, next to this creature that graces his life in the most terrible of ways. Close, close enough that Mycroft can feel his heat, but eternally just beyond reach.

Greg always smiles during sex. Laughs and nips and kisses, and Mycroft thinks he’s very good at what he does, doesn’t think further than that. Paid emotions, soft lips that have touched skin of every shade, laughed along with voices of every timbre, touched and been touched by hands of every size. Mycroft doesn’t try to fool himself any more than is necessary, doesn’t imagine that what they’re doing is making love when it’s something too cheap to be compared. He thinks of Greg’s face, forces himself to construct from memory although it is only a head's tilt away. He wonders how many people have fallen in love with that face, calculates a rising number inside his head and doesn’t count himself among them.

_When Greg took him it wasn't rough, but nor was it tender. If Mycroft closed his eyes and imagined a room away from here, where the smells were familiar, the roof new and clean, he could imagine Greg was being gentle. Could imagine Greg’s hands were loving on his hips, that they were holding for want and not for grip. But there is a difference between gentle and careful and even gluttony isn’t enough to blur that line._

He is not in love with Greg. Couldn’t be, doesn’t have enough data to affirm whether a good match would be met in them. But he feels something. Something raw and twisted, shaped by need and jealously and upset. Something dark that clutches at his insides in a bid to not reach out through him, snatch hold of Greg instead and suck the brightness from him. He feels something that makes him want to twist Greg into something ugly, possess and control him. He wants the very thing he fears most in this world, to destroy the only splendour he has ever known.

Mycroft swallows, clutches the sheets between his fingers and releases. He feels dirty and he feels ill.

‘Have you thought of leaving this place?’ His voice comes out dry and harsh, like an accusation, like this is the life Greg chose for himself, consenting to hands bruising his skin when they should be worshipping instead. And it _is_ the life Greg chose, of course it is. Mycroft has no entitlement over him, no right to paint him as a victim to appease Mycroft's own emotions, no right to feel his blood boil over the idea of others doing the very same thing he himself does, week after week.

_Greg’s thighs pressed against the backs of Mycroft’s as he moved, forehead rubbing between Mycroft’s shoulder blades, breathing hot air. Mycroft ached to steal that air for himself, wanted everything he could possibly get and wanted none of it at all. Wanted this to have never happened. Wanted to lie on his bed three months ago, alone and miserable, not knowing that relief could feel like something not relief at all. He wanted to not know what it was like._

Greg lets the book fall to his lap, fingers resting between its halves to keep his place. He stares forward, away from Mycroft, looking distant but not contemplative. He tilts his head and Mycroft feels the ugliness inside him rear up at the unfairness of it, the smoothness of Greg’s nape, the cleanness of his hair in the dirtiness of this place. To have to rent his touches, not a single one of them made outside of transaction.

‘I wanted to be on the police force,’ Greg says in a low voice. It’s an answer to something, but Mycroft tries to fit it to his question and finds the edges don’t align. Mycroft ponders its origin, whether this is common knowledge or a scrap for Mycroft to snatch up with greedy hands, a street rat to be grateful for whatever he can find. He wonders whether this is a confession of a childhood dream or a passing fancy Greg had only last month. He wants to know everything and the desire overwhelms him, makes his face feel hot and his skin tight. He wants to consume.

Greg turns to smile at him, so gentle Mycroft feels he could cry.

_‘Do you want me to?’_

_Greg’s hand slides around to his stomach and Mycroft feels a jump in his gut, feels coiled too tightly, feels overcome. He shakes his head - shakes it up and down, nodding, nodding, that’s not what he wanted - and Greg takes him in hand. He feels Greg’s skin on him, in and around and not the other way around. He touches the sheets and considers it penance, recites Hail Marys in his head and wonders if he will ever be able to accumulate enough to deserve to touch back._

‘But it’s not so bad here. It’s more than enough to make ends meet. I should be grateful, I suppose.’ The last is said absently, and Mycroft can already see Greg’s attention shifting back toward the novel in his lap, held in loose fingers when Mycroft thinks it should be grasped tight in agitation. Is this Greg trying to avoid, tired of a subject he does not bear to dwell on? Is it boredom, the same glassy disinterest that meets Mycroft with every conversation he instigates, every politician who claims passion but feels as cold inside as Mycroft does? Greg is so very hard to read, and yet Mycroft thinks that may not be it at all. Such simple emotions, life accepted with such grace, in however form it comes. Perhaps it is just that Greg has simplified his life too much, laid his emotions out too bare for Mycroft to be able to translate them.

Mycroft wants to tell Greg to come with him, wants to take him away from here, grant him every luxury this earth has to offer and never once feel ungracious toward this one pleasure in an otherwise thankless world. Mycroft wants to do anything and everything, wants to baptise Greg in his devotion and then burn him in his fire. Greg would never accept. Mycroft feels it, a place inside that once dared to hope and was crushed by the ruthlessness of the life he chose. Greg is too sturdy in himself, too self-sufficient, too protective of his pride. He must receive these offers all the time, promises of money and love and a new life. Anything he might please to be always at his fingertips, should he only say the word.

Greg would never become someone’s kept boy. A bird in a cage, something precious locked behind hard steel. Mycroft could never live with himself, to see Greg reduced to anything less than his worth, and Greg would never allow himself to feel helpless in a situation not on his terms. Mycroft doesn’t think he would know how not to try and control Greg, to reign in every part of him and breathe it into his soul.

_‘Mycroft,’ Greg exhaled into his ear and Mycroft came abruptly, silently, head down and mouth closed._

Mycroft says nothing, just nods and feels a sickly pressure build behind his eyes. His time is up, and he is sure it’s not just him feeling it. He stands and crosses around to Greg’s side of the bed. The man is laid out like a contented lion, strength and confidence in his comfortably sprawled limbs. A very picture of perfection, and Mycroft has to remind himself grimly that even to a dying man water does not taste sweet. It wouldn’t work, could never. An illusion. Just a fantasy to keep him warm at night.

‘Goodnight Gregory,’ he says, and is pulled into a kiss that is more bitter than it is sweet. The shame coils inside him before he even reaches the stairs, scratching at his insides during the silent car ride back to his apartment, almost choking him in his bedroom where _Lolita_ sits patiently on his bedside table.


End file.
